In a 2012 blog post that was modified last fall, the folks at Brainscape discuss Latin words that were borrowed into English and offer a list of the Top 25 Latin words and phrases that are still in use in English today. For today's post, I ran that list on a collection of tweets from 2013 to see which Latin terms were used and which were not, and, in the case of the former, how many tweets each term appeared in. The results of this analysis can be found below.

First, a bit on methodology. And by that I mean MY methodology, since the Brainscape post is rather vague on the methods used to compile its list. For the most part, I used the Brainscape list as is (or as was, should the post be modified again in the future). For instance, if the list provided a singular term, I also search, as I would typically do, for its plural counterpart as well (using either the English or the Latin plural marker, in this case). I did, however, sometimes run a search for both the two-word phrase that Brainscape provided and the two words as a single word if I knew the collapsed form to be in use, for instance, ante bellum as antebellum or post mortem as postmortem. Additionally, the program that I used for this exercise is good at ignoring spaces that people inadvertently (or intentionally) enter when writing words, and I kept the data in which that occurred and that the program churned out as output; however, I didn't then also look for other kinds of typos or creative flairs that tweeters might have posted, as there are, of course, many. Finally, the Twitter dataset that I used is a stratified, random sample of nearly 13,000,000 English tweets posted in 2013, which was compiled by my great friend Clayton Darwin and made accessible to me via BRDi tools. (And while I am at it: a shout-out to another great friend, Betsy Barry, who has, at various times, walked me through the use of BRDi tools, and without whom, along with Clayton, these exercises would not be possible.) 

Given the reputation Twitter has as a repository for slang, shorthand, and at times, rather colorful language, it probably isn't the first place one might think to look for Latin words and phrases. And it wasn't mine either: the first place I looked was, of course, my collection of pop music lyrics, which offered exactly one example in this regard (see below). However, when I did get around to Twitter, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much of the list could be accounted for there. Of the 27 terms I searched for (this number being arrived at due to breaking Brainscape's single "alum" category down into alumna, alumnus, and alumni), only 3 were nonexistent in the Twitter collection that I used: ad absurdum, alea iacta est, and mens rea**. Also, the representation of ante bellum as two words did not appear, although there were plenty of instances of antebellum, nearly all in reference to the musical group Lady Antebellum. 

So, without further ado, our top-ranking Latin word is.......................................................................

ALUMNI !!!

(its performance is shown in the table below, along with that of its relations alumna and alumnus)

The performance of alumni (and alumna and alumnus), as well as alma mater, presented in the figure below, speaks to the usefulness of Twitter for doing things like send out greetings, kudos, and invitations to groups of people with interests in common, such as Georgia Bulldog fans, Howard University graduates, the Finney High School Class of '77, et cetera.

Here are the results of the other 20 items with positive hits in the collection:

As shown here, Latin is alive and well (or, at least, surviving via English) on Twitter. A comment though: While still legit*** as far as this exercise is concerned, there are some ulterior motives in the use of some of these terms on Twitter (surprise, surprise). I mentioned above that the great majority of antebellum uses on Twitter were in reference to the musical group Lady Antebellum; the use of Anno Domini appears as though it is also used mostly (or perhaps, always) in reference to a rock band. It is possible that some of the uses of alias are in reference to a television show from the aughts as well. If you see any of these terms being used in reference to anything connected with the arts (be it a book, album, band, song, movie, etc.), please let me know in the comments section below.

Lastly, if you are interested in the only song from the Billboard year-end Top Thirty that included one of the Latin terms I was searching for, it is Eminem's "Lose Yourself," and the term is post mortem. 

And, of course, this famous example of a Latin phrase from the world of American film:

For a word search that includes all the Latin terms that were found in tweets, click here.

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*For an interesting discussion of what Twitter should be called in Latin, click here.

**I should also mention that I do not present the results for i.e., e.g., et al. and etc. here, but only that of their full forms, namely, id est, exempli gratia, et alii, and et cetera, respectively, due to their status as abbreviations rather than Latin words per se.

***Thanks, Cowan!